About Me

I got my first computer at age 8, and fell in love with it. By 12, I had started my own web design company, stylishly named martin.web.design. I set up a web site for it, and began marketing my services to whoever was interested.

Somehow, I got clients. An anthropologist from Papua New Guinea. A small university in California. A realty company. The Internet was new and exciting, and big web firms hadn’t yet established themselves. It was the perfect time to bust out my Dreamweaver skills and start making sites.

Fast forward to now. I’m 27, and consult in DC, mostly on intranet sites. The primary tool I use is SharePoint, which I’ve found can do wonders for internal processes. But I miss web design, and in my very long hiatus from creating sites from scratch I have missed out on the advent of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve used these things, but I haven’t really learned them.

In this series of blog posts, I want to understand modern web development inside and out. I hope you’ll come on this journey with me, as I learn:

How to start a modern web site front-end. Are frameworks such as Twitter Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation a good idea? When should one start from total scratch, and how? I’m going to create a front end, and share my experience.

How to start a modern web site back-end. What are the most popular tools right now? From platforms such as WordPress and Drupal, to languages such as PHP, Ruby, Node.JS, to frameworks such as Rails, to odd creatures that stand in between like Meteor… where is one supposed to start to code a web application? I’m going to create a web application, and share my experience.

Everything I make will be open source (I know, I’m already flattering myself assuming someone will want to use the code). This is a journey that I want to share in its entirety.

My next post will be about my idea for a web application. Then we’ll start creating it.

Follow me on Twitter (@coreyITguy) or by e-mail (click the lines icon on top of the page for the subscription form).

Did I mention this site will get a facelift as well?

Finally, I’d love to show you some of my early designs…

My web design homepage when I was 14Toward the beginning of Web 1.0, I loved to give advice…